The first time I was killed, or nearly so,
came just past dawn on election day 1987 at a deserted crossroads in northern
Haiti. I had endless time, in the half-second it took to collapse face-first
in the dust, to savor the tableau before me: jackknifed in the intersection,
a riderless motorcycle, front wheel still spinning; fanned across the
ground beside it a sheaf of blackened election ballots, one or two still
burning fitfully, the candidate's dark face and white teeth grinning
in the flames. I can see it still, this scene; still relish, sixteen years
later, the pleasure afforded by its facile symbols. The shooters, though,
I hardly glimpsed. A large sedan filled with militiamen, the car had barreled
headlong down the street; but now, in my mind's eye, it advances
slowly and I see no faces, only the muzzle of the weapon, see no flashes,
only the bursts of cement thrown up by the shells striking the walls.
As my face thuds against the earth, I feel a feathery caress at the nape
of my neck: the drizzle of plaster from the bullets tattooing the wall
above.

The second time I was killed, or nearly so, came a few hours later, just
north of the capital as we slowed at a roadblock of tree trunks and cinderblocks
and old car parts and a crowd of drunken peasants appeared from nowhere
and dragged us from the car. The rabble of men with machetes engulfed
us, churning and shouting; we argued, pleaded, holding our press cards
before us like pitiful shields. Then, after a moment's pause, the
scene turned very dark: the tough old man closest to me, small, leathery-faced,
narrow-eyed, hissed, "Kommunis!"Communist! I'd heard it
often that week, shouted at moments like this one; and as he raised his
machete and the foot or so between us began to vanish I was startled to
feel, behind my fear, a moment of intense narrative pleasure: yes, of
course. After a week of standing ogling, cameras and notebooks poised,
as Haitians chopped to pieces other Haitians a few feet from us, after
a week spent recording precisely what body part and how much of it was
hacked off and paraded triumphantly down the street, suddenly on this
bloody election day the privileged position we had taken for granted—untouchable,
unreachable, white—collapses and we are dragged, mouths agape and
fingers clinging with ridiculous desperation to our now useless notebooks
and cameras, onto the stage to become props in the bloody play. Surprising
yet inevitable, like any good climax. Of course the story would end this
way. How perfect.

On the other hand, perhaps it was all a bit too . . . pat, this story
of reporters hacked to pieces by their own story. Someone clearly thought
so; for at precisely the necessary moment on that utterly deserted road
a wealthy man, a diminutive mulatto in a sports shirt driving an expensive
four-wheel-drive, happened upon us and, armed with nothing more than his
light skin and a half-century's practice in ruling over those darker
than himself, commanded the peasants with their raised machetes to "Fuck
off out of there!"And they, after an excruciating moment of wide-eyed
and near-comic paralysis—however near-revolutionary their drunken
mood had been—did just that. On a day marked by the world to let
the poorest of the poor take power in Haiti, on a day on which four less
lucky reporters died in pools of their own blood on those sun-drenched
streets, we owed our lives to our white skins and the Haitian color hierarchy.
What better irony than that?

Still, irony is cheap and I must admit a
secret preference for the violent outcome. I could tell it that way, of
course—I just did, nearly so—but then it would be fiction. And,
alas, a funny thing happens to the story on the way to the fiction shelf:
it acquires a cheap veneer of melodrama. On the other hand, as a New Yorker
"fact piece"—which was what I was writing—the story
would have worked just fine, for the looming melodrama would have been
excused, given a free pass by the fact that these characters and events
happened to have counterparts in reality. On the other hand, if my preferred
violent outcome had come to pass—had qualified as fact—I could
not have been the one writing it.

We are all storytellers; we all work with narrative. We differ only in
the rules we follow. And these rules, when set against the subtlety of
narrative modes—the interplay of irony and symbol and structure—are
very broad indeed, a breadth perfectly expressed by that most ridiculous
of non-category categories: "nonfiction.""There is no
such thing as a work of pure factuality,"writes Janet Malcolm, "any
more than there is one of pure fictitiousness."She goes on:

As every work of fiction draws on life, so every work of nonfiction
draws on art. As the novelist must curb his imagination in order to
keep his text grounded in the common experience of man . . . so the
journalist must temper his literal-mindedness with the narrative devices
of imaginative literature.

Whether employed by a writer needing to "curb his imagination"
or one seeking to "temper his literal-mindedness,"these narrative
devices do not change. Plot, character, symbol are the ways we order experience,
and the stories we tell, whatever their relation to "fact"or
their final address in the bookstore, have these in common. If we persist
in organizing works of narrative by their relationship to "truth,"
we'll find the official genres intersecting, looping back on one
another. Place Nora Ephron's Heartburn next to Ryszard Kapuscinski's
The Emperor and ask which is "truer to the facts."Ephron's
"novel"is a roman í clef and many in Washington could
identify the "real"original of every character and no doubt
the time and place of every scene. For The Emperor, one would have great
difficulty doing the same, though Kapuscinski's book is the "true
story"of the fall of Haile Selassie, and no account of those events
bears more truth or is told with more art.

Rules constrain but they also help us see. The pleasures that washed
through me as I contemplated the riderless motorcycle and the burning
ballots—symbols of a leaderless country and a torched election—are
narrative pleasures, rooted deep within us. As with all arts unfolding
in time, they draw their first life from suspense—from the need to
quicken and advance. The sonata form, and its gripping epic of migration
from the tonic to the dominant and then back again, is an archetype of
this. In narrative, it is plot, story, resolution: the ineluctable move
toward climax and denouement. We build these shapes into our world, into
our public narratives and our private ones, whether they chart going to
war or falling in love.

When we turn to stories of foreign places, to the erotic pull of the
strange, it is no mystery that violence and death lie close to the heart
of the darkness we find so mysterious—and feel so compelled to understand.
As climactic events, violent acts offer the lure of illumination. As a
onetime Haitian president told me, "Violence strips naked the body
of a society, the better to place the stethoscope and hear the life beneath
the skin."He meant, I think, that coups d'etat and revolutions—political
violence in general—reveal in their unfolding the true but normally
hidden structures of power. By enacting power in motion they show it in
reality. And indeed it took only weeks for my friend's political
bon mot to be revealed as prophecy, when he was overthrown and exiled
by his erstwhile army chief.

He did not die, this president, but in his overthrow others did. He had
accomplished little, having accepted power from a handful of disgraced
and bloodstained officers in his need to write the conclusion to his own
romance, a private tale of grandeur that had been spooling through his
head during a quarter century of exile. Drunk with tales of war and triumph
from the magical past of his ruined country, he had become desperate to
see his own story completed—to see his "destiny fulfilled."
And yet despite the struggle for power and the deaths entailed in losing
it, his story was in the end a low one, with little to commend it to the
chroniclers. Or such, anyway, is the verdict of the writer of "fact
pieces"; a fiction writer might see it differently.

The man who killed me, or nearly so—the
man who offered guns to those faceless men in the sedan, who had given
rum to drink and a roadblock to guard to that band of peasants—had
killed hundreds that day, murdered during his life hundreds more; and
yet when I met him for breakfast in one of the capital's modern hotels,
watched him carefully cut his mango there by the shimmering blue pool
overlooking the city, I saw he would fail me as a character. However great
his crimes appeared to me—the piles of bodies on election day, the
hundreds tortured and murdered during the bloodiest days of the dictatorship—to
him they were politics, that's all, the way the system worked. He
seemed puzzled by my interest. There was no grandeur there: killing and
torture were his day job, the dull mechanics of his profession. His art,
on the other hand, was his Ideas—his Vision for the Nation. He cut
his mango and set forth his Vision, smiling after each bite. He had killed
me, or nearly so, and now we were both disappointed. His art did not interest
me.

The third time I was killed, or nearly so, came on an unseasonably warm
February day in a crowded market in Sarajevo. The schedule had slipped
and we had not yet arrived when the mortar shell landed, leading us to
find, moments later, a dark swamp of blood and broken bodies and staggering
about in it the bereaved, shrieking and wailing amid an overwhelming stench
of cordite. Already two men, standing in rubber boots knee-deep in a thick
black lake, had begun to toss body parts into the back of a truck. Slipping
about on the wet pavement, I tried my best to count the bodies and the
parts of them, but the job was impossible: fifty? sixty? When all the
painstaking matching had been done, sixty-eight had died there.

When I lunched with their killer the following day—the leader of
the Serbs, surrounded in his mountain villa by a handful of beautiful
bodyguards—he had little interest in the numbers. "Did you check
their ears?"he asked. I'm sorry? "They had ice in their
ears."I paused at this and took a moment to work on my stew. He
meant the bodies had been planted, that the entire scene had been trumped
up by Bosnian intelligence agents. He was a psychiatrist, this man, and
it seemed to me, after a few minutes of questions, that he had gone far
to convince himself of the truth of this scenario. He, too, preferred
to speak of his Vision for the Nation.

For me, the problem in depicting him was simple: the level of his crimes
dwarfed the content of his character. His motivations were paltry, in
no way commensurate with the pain he had caused. It is often a problem
with evil. Chat with a Salvadoran general about the massacre of a thousand
people that he ordered and he will tell you that it was military necessity,
that those people were supporting the guerrillas, that they had put themselves
in harm's way, and that "such things happen in war."Speak
to the young conscript who did the killing and he will tell you that he
hated what he had to do, that he has nightmares about it still, but that
he was following orders and that if he had refused he would have been
killed. Neither is lying. Search for evil there and once you leave the
corpses behind you will have great difficulty finding the needed grimacing
face.

Talking with mass murderers is invariably a disappointment. Great acts
so rarely call forth great character that the relation between the two
seems nearly random. The fiction writer is free to correct this imbalance;
the writer of fact, alas, is trapped by the rules he purports to follow.
I could not make my killer into a great man; I had to fall back, as had
Hannah Arendt, on irony—on the fact of this discrepancy between the
magnitude of the acts and the banality of the actor. There is compensation,
though, in this inequality; what Malcolm calls the reader's "epistemological
insecurity,"according to which, "in a work of nonfiction we
almost never know the truth of what happened."She goes on:

We must always take the novelist's and the playwright's and
the poet's word, just as we are almost always free to doubt the
biographer's or the autobiographer's or the historian's
or the journalist's. In imaginative literature we are constrained
from considering alternative scenarios—there are none. This is
the way it is. Only in nonfiction does the question of what happened
and how people thought and felt remain open. We can never know everything;
there is always more.

Floating in an ocean of "epistemological insecurity,"my killer
will remain a dynamic element, threatening the reader not only with his
vitality but with his refusal to conform to the boundaries of his depiction.
The fiction writer might provide motivation, attempt to draw a character
interesting enough, compelling enough, to justify the acts he has committed.
Once completed, however, this portrait is all there is, unmediated, true
only to the writer's imagination and on that truth it will stand
or fall. Can one construct a character commensurate with the hundred dead
that election day? It is, surely, a great burden—that "this
is the way it is."And it is partly to unshoulder that burden that
fiction writers experiment so excitedly with point of view, in order to
undermine in their narratives—as James did in The Sacred Fount or
Ford in The Good Soldier—the unbearable "epistemological certainty"
with which their profession had saddled them.

It is why Conrad constructed his Kurtz, perhaps fiction's most famous
mass murderer, almost entirely of suspense, of the primal stuff of narrative
itself. Kurtz's words are legendary: "The horror! The horror!"
But apart from indirectly reported ravings before he dies, they are nearly
all he says. The man is constructed not of dialogue or even direct description
but of expectation and, finally, of dread. The dread belongs first to
those who know him, then to Marlowe, and finally to us. The problem of
evil my murderers could not solve for me is thrown back upon the reader.
The "heart of darkness"is our own.

To construct the central character out of
shadow and dread: it is a feat of narrative virtuosity that the fact writer
can only envy. For us, of course, the light would be too bright; readers
of "fact,"waiting to see the killer, would simply find the
reporting a bit thin. Conrad could accomplish his legerdemain only by
way of a fictional stand-in: the voice of his storyteller. The drama over
evil is painted in Marlowe's mind, so as to instill it in our own.
Verisimilitude through point of view is the fiction writers' modern
road to truth. Seeking light in worlds that seem impossibly dark, they
come to crave some of the doubt taken for granted in writing fact. They
long to make it real.